To Catch A Unicorn

by Sara Seale

  By now Laura had her elbows on the table and her chin propped on her hands. It must be the lamplight, she supposed, that was fostering such uncharacteristic topics.

  "Not really," she said, trying to remember. "It was a very long poem. Something about an old king on a hilltop ..."

  " 'High on the hill-top The old King sits; He is now so old and grey, He's nigh lost his wits!' "

  Bella quoted triumphantly, and Cleo pushed back her chair with a grating scrape of impatience.

  "I shall lose mine if you all indulge in much more whimsy," she said tartly. "Really, Dom! I wouldn't have expected you to support Laura's tiresome love of nonsense."

  Too late Laura realised that, in Cleo's present mood, it had been the height of tactlessness to draw attention to herself.

  "Wouldn't you, Cleo?" Dominic replied, sounding abstracted, and she gave a hard little laugh.

  "No, I wouldn't. The Trevaynes, on their own showing, are of the earth, earthy—or are you, perhaps, just amusing yourself unkindly at my gullible cousin's expense?"

  "You're in danger of over-playing your hand," he said very quietly, and Cleo suddenly hit out at him. He caught her wrists firmly in one hand, and as they stared into each other's eyes for a long, silent moment, Laura gave a little shiver. They were, she realised, oblivious for the moment of the fact that they were not alone, and that mutual spark of passion, and Dominic's savage "Behave yourself! I'm not Perry!" seemed to reveal a closer acquaintanceship with one another than the casual exchanges of everyday life would have led one to suspect, or perhaps it was merely a hangover from the unsatisfactory afternoon.

  Cleo laughed again with pleasurable unconcern, as Dominic let her go, and glancing across at Peregrine's derisive face Laura saw he was unsurprised. Derision mingled with bitter amusement and he sat back lazily, as if watching a play, idly flipping bread pellets across the table.

  The old hound came shuffling round Cleo's chair for attention, and she dropped him a chicken bone, only to have Dominic round on her with irritable displeasure.

  "Don't you know better than to give a dog chicken-bones? They splinter and can pierce the intestines," he snapped, and Cleo jumped up, stretching her body with an impatient twist as though there was still a surplus store of energy to be released.

  "Let's go out," she said to Peregrine. "Let's find the bright lights for an hour or two—since Dom won't take me."

  "The pubs will be shut," said Dominic. "We were late with supper."

  "Then let's take the car and drive around. You'll let me drive, won't you, Perry? She's a honey, that bus of yours— Troy would have loved her."

  Laura wondered if Troy had been a deliberate reminder of her kinship with them, and for a moment she thought Peregrine was going to refuse rudely, then he got to his feet with a suddenness that sent his chair crashing to the floor and swaggered from the room, pulling Cleo after him.

  Laura remained sitting, her hands folded under the table like an apprehensive little girl awaiting adult permission to

  get down. Dominic's eyes remained fixed on the closed door for a minute, a frown drawing his eyebrows into a straight, uncompromising black line, then he seemed to become aware of Laura sitting there so mutely and the frown deepened.

  "Well, it's been quite a day, one way and another, hasn't it?" he said, getting up from the table. "Bella, you'd better see that Amos hasn't forgotten to put lamps in the girls' rooms before we go to bed."

  "When I was a girl we had to make do with candles," Bella replied with her oblique method of answering a question. "Winding-sheets ... I can remember them still ... such a satisfactory reminder of the decay of the flesh."

  "Winding-sheets?" Laura echoed, her eyes growing big at this final touch of the macabre, and Dominic, on his way to the door, said without turning his head:

  "The melted wax that runs down the sides, Miss Mouse of the literal mind. Even Bella wasn't compelled to go to bed in her shroud. Goodnight."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By morning the incident should have appeared no more to Laura than the trifling flare-up Penzion had accustomed her to, but she was not, she realised, able to stand outside Trevayne affairs so easily as when she had first come. Her relations with Dominic had shifted almost imperceptibly to another plane, as, she thought, had his with her. She did not want to become personally involved with this strange household so alien to her known background, but their varying small demands on her would no longer permit her to stand apart, and her own awakening fondness for Dominic was a factor that disturbed her.

  "How does one know?" she asked Bella, the day after that uncomfortable sequence of events resulting from Nicky's visit to the works.

  The day was Good Friday, for Easter was late that year. The Zion Works would be traditionally closed for a week, and Laura had looked forward with slight trepidation to day upon day of unrelieved Treyayne company.

  "Know what, dear child?" said Bella with obliging attention, but clearly more interested in counting with the linen they were sorting together in the little annexe off the kitchen which had once been the still-room.

  "I don't quite know," Laura said, and indeed she had no idea why her vagrant thoughts should have led her to near self-betrayal.

  "Of course you haven't," Bella answered with a soothing rejection of confidences not yet ripe for dissection. "When one is young, so many imagined problems ... so many perplexities ... but it all sorts out, you know."

  "Does it?"

  "When one is young," Bella continued, inspecting a pile of clearly forgotten assortments of unmatching table mats with some surprise, "everything seems complex, but so little really

  is, except the ordinary demands of life like the lights failing and fleas in the dogs and the elastic in one's knickers giving out at the most awkward moment—don't you agree?"

  Peregrine, putting his head round the door in time to hear Bella's last observation, asked with interest whose knickers were giving out.

  "If it's yours, Miss Bread-and-butter, I'll stand by to watch the fun," he said, grimacing at Laura. It was perhaps unfortunate that Dominic also happened to be passing and was clearly in no mood for banter.

  "Can't you keep your prep school humour for more appropriate occasions?" he said as he went on his way, and Peregrine made a rude noise.

  "What's eating Big Brother of late?" he demanded of Bella. "Can it be that our innocent Laura has managed to get under his skin, despite the more obvious attractions of cousin Cleo? I always told him, you know, that he was the protective type."

  "Did you, dear boy?" said Bella without surprise. "Well, that's scarcely your own discovery. Dom is the only one of the three of you with a touch of his mother's tenderness."

  "Well, for crying out loud!" Peregrine exclaimed, slapping her on her ample posterior. "Are you going over to the enemy at this late stage?"

  "Do you think of Dominic as the enemy, then?" Bella asked, fixing him for a moment with that pale, china-blue gaze, and he gave a little shrug.

  "Not really, I suppose. He just needles me," he said, like a small boy shamed for once into honesty, then catching Laura's wide-eyed look of troubled uncertainty, he tweaked her hair and added with the old banter: "Laura, I have a notion, shares your partisanship, Bella, old girl. Is it possible, do you think, she cherishes a secret weakness for the predatory overlord? Look! She's blushing!"

  Laura, aware of that treacherous colour, was too much occupied with a renewal of disquieting suspicions regarding her own emotions to make her customary retort, but Bella remarked with dispassionate calm:

  "That may or may not be so, dear boy, but nothing, surely, to cause amazement. A weakness is one thing—a tendresse quite another."

  "Right as always, you wise old faggot," he acknowledged handsomely, and winked at Laura, but joining Cleo a little later on the terrace where it was warm enough now to sit out in the midday sun, he observed, with the provocative lack of preamble that could always throw her off guard, that it wouldn't at all surprise him if Broth
er Dom wasn't at last in danger of being hooked.

  Cleo, rather prematurely wooing a becoming tan, preened herself complacently and retorted:

  "Why not? Don't you think I'd be good enough for the head of the house? We would make a rather striking couple, don't you think?"

  Peregrine sat down on one of the stone benches that rather incongruously dotted these flowerless gardens, and his expression was not pleasant.

  "I was referring to the little cousin, not to you," he said, taking pleasure in the angry colour creeping under her skin. "That little exhibition of yours last night at supper might strike sparks off Troy and me, but it isn't the bait to catch Dom with, despite his blood, as I think I told you later."

  "It struck sparks all right!"

  "But not the right ones."

  "You were jealous," she snapped, and his smile broadened.

  "Oh, I was jealous all right—you intended that, didn't you? Are you seriously making a play for the head boy?"

  "Why not? I want security for myself as well as for my son. I'm tired of being unattached."

  "How virtuous you sound when you allude to your son instead of to the brat. You don't care a damn for him, do you?"

  "I try, but I must confess children bore me. They bored Troy, too—they would bore you, Perry, and that's probably why—"

  "I won't marry you? I admire your honesty, I must own, but your importunate brat isn't the only stumbling block."

  "What then?"

  "You know very well. I don't want to be tied."

  "Aren't you tied to Dom and the quarry and the whole tiresome family set-up so long as you remain?"

  "There's that, of course. Still and all—"

  "Still and all, I don't mind betting if Nicky was out of the way, you'd sing a different tune," Cleo said, and rolled on to her back, spread-eagling her limbs with sensuous pleasure on the rug laid out on the grass.

  "Perhaps," he said. It would, he knew, take more than his too-familiar taunts and pinpricks to shake that colossal self-confidence, so he returned to the original bait.

  "You don't seem to take the prospect of a rival very seriously," he said with gentle venom, and smiled at the instinctive little kick of annoyance she gave with one foot.

  "Hardly, if it's Laura you're referring to," she snapped.

  "Who else? You'd scarcely consider Bella a serious stumbling block at her age, would you?"

  "Don't be fatuous! I'll admit it's crossed my mind that poor Laura might be succumbing to a weakness for an imagined hero of her adolescent day-dreams, but she'll get over it."

  He laughed a little cruelly.

  "Bella has just informed me that a weakness is one thing and a tendresse is quite another. She seems to think Dom is capable of both—one leading to the other, so to speak. Quite a thought, isn't it?"

  "Really, Perry! You know quite well what Bella is when she's got some bee in her bonnet!"

  "This one might be buzzing to some purpose, my pretty, if you care to look for the signs. Can't you tell them, or don't you want to? Haven't you noticed the observant eye in the background guarding the ewe lamb from contamination with our sleazy pubs, and being mindful of youth and innocence, etc., etc.?"

  "That's no reason for assuming anything deeper. He treats her like a child and is probably merely very conscious of that tiresome sense of responsibility he has come to take so

  seriously. In any case, Laura's much too dumb to make the running, even if she had any inkling of success."

  "Oh, I grant you that. The poor sweet's scarcely dry behind the ears yet, as Dom once pointed out when telling me to lay off."

  "Well, there you are, then. All this childish nonsense to draw red herrings," said Cleo comfortably, and he looked down at her with the cynical eyes of a man who, despite recognition of his own worthlessness, admits a reluctance to break entirely free.

  "So you'd marry Dom, if you could get him, in spite of what's been between us?" he asked, with curiosity rather than regret, and she smiled at him lazily.

  "What makes you think I won't get him?" she said. "I hold the trump card. He wants Nicky."

  "What in hell do you mean?"

  "He told Laura he would like to bring the boy up here— on certain conditions. It might be reasonably supposed, don't you think, that the conditions could include me? After all, if one's to believe gossip, the love of the poor man's life was the girl Troy took from him, so conventional reasons for marriage are quite in order. He needs heirs, and if I don't inspire undying love I can certainly stir the more primitive passions, as you'll agree."

  "Oh, yes, my charming trollop, I'll agree, but I hardly think you'd oblige so readily in the matter of heirs."

  "Of course not, but who's to say where that fault would lie? Nicky would make up. And why should you care, Perry? You'll still be living here. You'll be in the enviable position of having your cake and eating it, just as I intend to do."

  For a moment his eyes lost their habitual boldness and were the eyes of a man shocked into unfamiliar disgust.

  "You really are a tramp, aren't you?" he said quite quietly, and she gave him a quick, uncertain look.

  "I'm amoral, which is perhaps a little different," she retorted coolly. "Don't forget Troy taught me his own code of ethics, which is why we made a go of marriage, despite his roving temperament. I don't mind betting, either, that you

  wouldn't stand out for loyalty if it came to the test."

  "Oh, no, I'll grant you that," he replied with the old impudence. "Between us, we'd make a good show of cheating the poor blighter all round, wouldn't we?"

  She stretched with cat-like indolence, and smiled at him across the slowly tightening material across her full, firm breasts.

  "Cheating?" she said, and wrinkled her nose at him.

  "Certainly. Fun for me, and no heirs for him. Charming!"

  "Laura threw that at me, too. I didn't know then, of course, she was cherishing a hopeless passion for Dom."

  "Don't be so sure it's hopeless, my pretty Cleo. Look at that," Peregrine said with malicious amusement.

  Dominic and Laura were coming round the side of the house, walking with the leisurely familiarity of old friends, or even of tomorrow's lovers. Dominic's earlier ill-humour seemed to have left him, for he had an arm round Laura's shoulders and she was laughing up at him. As they neared the terrace where Cleo and Peregrine were still hidden from them, he suddenly picked her up to lift her over a low wall and held her, for a moment, high in his arms.

  "How light you are!" he said as he set her down again, and smoothed a disordered strand of her hair back into place with an unconscious little gesture of tenderness.

  "What a touching display of gallantry. Laura is capable of stepping over low walls herself, you know," Cleo said with, she realised as she saw the amused expression on both men's faces, a too hasty petulance.

  "Miaow!" squeaked Peregrine with such likelife imitation of a cat that the dogs sprang up, barking hysterically. The smallest of the bitches, a fawning, subservient creature without much charm, caught a good-natured kick from Peregrine in passing and promptly flung herself on her back in an ecstasy of apology and worship.

  "That's women for you—treat 'em rough and they always come back for more!" Peregrine said. "It's the secret of Trevayne success with the fair sex, isn't it, Dom?"

  "Speak for yourself. I don't go in for that sort of court-

  ship," Dominic said good-temperedly, but his eyes idly rested with rather an odd expression on Laura, who found herself thinking that, if sufficiently aroused to anger, the dark Trevayne would not be too particular what methods he employed to ram home his authority.

  Bella came out to tell them lunch was nearly ready and if someone would shut the dogs up, Nicky could join them for five minutes before he sat down to his own.

  "Oh, I'd forgotten him!" Laura exclaimed remorsefully. "Cleo, you should have reminded me to fetch him down."

  "You're his temporary nanny, it's up to you to remember," Cleo retorted w
ith good-humoured indifference. "But I'll confess, I forgot him myself, poor brat, and it really is time he got over his fear of the dogs."

  "He's getting much better. It only needs a little more time and patience. He's afraid of being knocked over, which is understandable when you consider his size," Laura said.

  "Is anyone going into Merrynporth tomorrow?" Bella asked, as Dominic went off to the kennels, the pack at his heels.

  "I'd thought of going to the races. Why? Forgotten to order in enough food for the holiday, you vague old faggot?" said Peregrine, and Bella looked even more vague.

  "No, there should be enough with the capons and lamb, and I shall make a giant pasty with plenty of potatoes and onions. I was thinking of eggs."

  "Eggs! For God's sake! We've got enough hens of our own, haven't we?"

  "Yes, dear boy, of course. I mean Easter eggs. I know we never bother with such things, but we have a child in the house now."

  "Don't bother on Nicky's account—we've never kept Easter, either," said Cleo, and Laura said, grateful for Bella's support :

  "But that's sad, Cleo. Chocolate eggs and fluffy chickens were such fun when one was small. Is there a bus to Merrynporth on a Saturday, Bella?"

  "I'll drive you in. We'll make a do of it and rope in Dom

  and have lunch there. I can go racing on Monday," Peregrine said, but Cleo, doubtless reminded of Dominic's cancelled invitation of the night before, turned sulky.

  "Take Laura if you want to, but count me out. Dom and I can put our feet up here and spend a more rewarding afternoon than poking about for crummy Easter eggs," she said, and Peregrine's smile was mocking.

  "Right!" he said. "You do that little thing, my pretty, and try your hand at diplomacy—or would seduction be a better definition? Laura and I have never had a jaunt on our own, have we, Miss Bread-and-butter? I for one will look forward to the binge. Are you going to bring the brat out, Bella, or shall I go and fetch him?"

  "I shall go and dye some eggs," Bella answered with disappointing matter-of-factness, and went into the house.

  Laura set off with Peregrine the next morning as pleased as a child given an unexpected treat. The warm weather was an excuse to wear a pretty dress, and her doubts of yesterday were forgotten, or pushed aside, for the day was fine and warm, trips into Merrynporth were rare enough to provide mild excitement, and there was a holiday feeling in the air.